## Time-stamp: <2017-12-26 16:25:54 vk> ## This file is best viewed with GNU Emacs Org-mode: http://orgmode.org/

What were you doing on February 14th of 2007? On which tasks were you working on that very day you met your girl friend? When was the last appointments with your dentist? Who called you on telephone during that meeting with your customer last month?

Most people can not answer such questions. With Memacs you can!

Memacs extracts metadata (subjects, timestamps, contact information, …) from many different existing data sources (file names, emails, tweets, bookmarks, …) on your computer and generates files which are readable by GNU Emacs with Org-mode.

Example:

   emails              -> memacs-maildir.org \
   SMS                 -> memacs-sms.org      |
   RSS-feeds           -> memacs_rss.py       |
   bank statements     -> memacs-easybank.py  |>  Memacs
   postings            -> memacs-slrn.org     |
   git repository logs -> memacs_git.py       |
   svn repository logs -> memacs_svn.py      /
   |_________________|   |_________________|     |______|
   your personal data      Memacs modules        Org-mode

Memacs - as the central component of the system - is a hub for all the connectors that add data from individual data sources. Those connectors are called Memacs modules or short module.

• target group: Users of Emacs and Org-mode
• skills necessary: creating/modifying shell script code; creating scheduled tasks
• project hosted on https://github.com/novoid/Memacs

• Installation
• Getting started
• Memacs modules
• Example story
• Background
• Contribute
• License

• clone or download repository from github
• make sure to use python v2.7
• create a virtualenv or
• export/set PYTHONPATH

PYTHONPATH=/path/to/memacs

• install dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt

Please make sure you also read the FAQ’s and best practices, as it contains many tips and tricks on how to meet your requirements and on how to choose a reasonable setup.

• choose the modules you want to use and set them up one by one
• each module shares global options in common but also comes with its very own set of custom arguments
• read the files in the docs folder and start modules from the bin folder of Memacs
• start the module of your choice with the argument --help, e.g. bin/memacs_csv.py --help
• you probably want to develop and test a module invocation in the command line and
• when it works, set up a periodical invocation (cronjob)

• arbtt
• battery
• csv
• filenametimestamps
• git
• gpx
• ical
• imap
• lastfm
• mu
• phonecalls
• photos
• rss
• simplephonelogs
• sms
• svn
• twitter
• whatsapp

This module is an example for developers: docs/memacs_csv.org

Those modules are not adopted to the new unified framework yet:

• maildir
• mbox (also useful for newsgroups)
  • see also emails/mbox/works-for-me-hack/memacs_mbox.org
• bank account:
  • easybank.at: see tmp/bank_statements/easybank.at/memacs_easybank.org
• newsgroups
  • slrn: see emails/mbox/works-for-me-hack/memacs_mbox.org

Following modules exist as a rough idea only and might get implemented some day (by you?):

• tagstore: see tmp/tagstore/memacs-tagstore.org
• calendar:
  • JPilot-datebook: see calendar/memacs_jpilot-datebook.org
• tasks:
  • JPilot-todos: see tasklists/jpilot-todos/memacs_jpilot-todos.org
• blog_systems:
  • Serendipity: see blog_systems/serendipity/memacs_serendipity.org

Imagine you are already using Memacs.

When remembering that day, when you joined an interesting talk about «Getting Things Done» (GTD), you start up your GNU Emacs with your main Org-mode file. There you go to the Agenda-view and select this specific day a couple of months ago.

There it is, from 2pm to 3pm you scheduled this talk in your calendar. And then you realize that within this time frame, there appear some JPEG files containing an ISO 8601 time stamp[1] are indexed by one module. (filenametimestamp-module)

This image contains a slide you found interesting and which you photographed using your sleek smartphone. Who would remember having taken a picture during a talk?

Ten minutes after the talk you wrote a short message on Twitter where you mentioned useful URLs for your followers. This time those URLs are handy for yourself too! (Twitter-module)

On the evening of that day you see an entry of an incoming email from the author of the talk. Now you remember having had a cool conversation at the end of the talk where he promised you some additional information about that nice little GTD tool on his computer. Great that you got that link to that email too. Without Memacs you would probably never remembered that email again. (Maildir-module)

And then there were some bookmarks you saved this day, almost all related to great ideas you got from the GTD talk. (delicious-module)

This small story shows only a few use cases where different modules combine given data sources and their information to provide an overall view related to an event. Since Org-mode has got links, no actual data has to be duplicated (except the meta data extracted by Memacs). Emails, files, bookmarks, and so forth are linked rather than copied.

[1] with periods instead of colons - just because the ancient limitations of Microsoft based file systems; like «2011-02-14T14.35.42 ideas.jpg»

In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote a famous article «As We May Think» where he develops the idea of having a «memory extender» called Memex. The memex can store all letters, books, and other information which are related to a person.

Besides having foreseen several technologies like hypertext, he defined a device that holds all metadata and data and provides associative trails to access information.

In the last decade of the previous century Microsoft Research had a research program that resulted in MyLifeBits. This software tried to store each information of the user like office documents, screenshots, name of active windows on the desktop computer, and even automatically took photographs (SenseCam). This word did not result in any (open) software product. Bell and Gemmell wrote a book called «Total Recall».

The Memacs project tries to implement the ideas of Vannevar Bush’s vision with open source and open standards. Hence, it’s name «Memacs» is the obvious combination of «GNU Emacs» and «Memex».

Memacs uses GNU Emacs Org-mode to visualize and access information extracted by Memacs modules: using tags, time stamps, full text search, and so forth GNU Emacs is able to derive different views. The most important view probably is the Agenda-view where you can see anything that happened during a specific day/week/month according to the time frame selected. But you can derive other views too. For example you can choose to generate a condensed search result using a boolean combination of tags.

Related to Memacs, the project founder developed a research software called tagstore. This system allows users to store (local) files using tags without a hierarchy of folders. As a natural extension, tagstore targets associative access for (local) files. You might want to check out tagstore too. Memacs and tagstore are a very useful combination.

If you do like to know how to efficiently organize digital files in a simple and operating system independent way, read this blog post from Karl. It might give you ideas for your workflows as well.

Karl also wrote a whitepaper on Memacs which describes Memacs from a scientists point of view.

If you want to contribute to this cool project, please fork and contribute or write an additional module!

See docs/FAQs_and_Best_Practices.org for more developing information.

We are sure that there are a lot of cool ideas for other modules out there! This is just the beginning!

Memacs is designed with respect to minimal effort for new modules.

We are using Python PEP8 and Test Driven Development (TDD).

Memacs is licensed under the GPLv3 license.